Working on the Internet

Posts tagged "relative time"

While working on a side-project of mine, I came across the need to display dates and times as relative instead of absolute. You know, saying “two hours ago” instead of “Mon Jan 5 17:24:33 GMT-0700 2011”. Since the web is going real-time these days, it just makes sense. Besides, everyone’sdoingit, so it must be good! Anyways, I wrote a library (really, just a simple class) that you can use to do this with ActionScript. It’s really quite simple, but since I couldn’t find it anywhere else, I thought I’d contribute it here for everyone to use too. Here it is in action…

If you’re wondering, I’ve tried to follow the convention that Facebook uses for what format to display and when. Twitter has a very similar format, but I decided to go with Facebook’s. Also, if you notice, my library can handle times in the future as well as times in the past. Here’s how to use it…

Usage:

Once you’ve added the library to your project, it’s really quite easy to use. Just call any of the two available APIs and pass in a date or two and you’ll get back the relative time string. Done!